Remember, One Good Reason is meant to go together with authentic conversational evangelization. It should be inserted into our four-step method: Listen, Befriend, Proclaim, and Invite. Let’s look a little closer, then, at how it fits into the context of a conversation.
So you’ve just begun a conversation with someone. Your goal at this stage is to listen and befriend. You want to learn about the person, make a connection with her, and gain her trust. You want to do so with authenticity; you’re not befriending her merely as a means to converting her. You have an authentic interest in her, an interest which grows out of real Christian love. With all sincerity, you ask her questions, listen to her answers, ask follow-up questions, listen more, and begin to find areas of common ground.
At some point after this, you will need to make the transition to proclaiming to her the Gospel or some religious truth; and so your secondary goals, during this time, have to do with figuring out where this person is in her faith life. Whether she knows it or not, she is on a spiritual journey. She may be stuck in the starting blocks, or stuck after tripping over an obstacle in the way. Or she might be moving along well enough, but like all of us, she needs help along the way.
In your conversation, you need to avoid any artificial rushing from listening to befriending, and befriending to proclaiming. Feel free to spend some time getting to know the person, making connections, and then moving on to topics of religion. On the other hand, don’t underestimate the interest that she may have in religious topics, and for that reason artificially drag out the conversation. A lot of this will have to do with the context of the conversation, your relationship with the person, and your own individual gifts and personality.
If you’re doing street evangelization, the person would already know that you want to talk about religion, and the fact that she’s stopped to talk to you means that on some level, she’s interested in hearing what you have to say. In that case, you may move along a little more quickly to topics of religion—you might even start with them! As long as you still ask her questions and listen to her answers, and build common ground, you can still have a great conversation.
Moving along, let’s say that you’re having a conversation; you’ve listened, and befriended. Now it’s time to find out where the person is in matters of faith and religion. At this point, you need to start asking her questions in those areas—such as “Do you believe in God?” or “Are you a Christian?” Hopefully, the questions will build off naturally from the conversation you’ve been having.
In the process of asking questions, it’s important that you don’t accept a label for a story. What you think someone means by a particular label, and what he actually means by that label, may be two different things. For example, during the course of a conversation, someone might say that he’s Protestant, and you might think, “That means this guy firmly believes that the Bible alone is the sole religious authority, and that we can’t ever lose our salvation by sin.” But that might not be what he means at all. Maybe he just calls himself a Protestant because he isn’t Catholic, or maybe his parents identify as Protestants, so he identifies that way too. Maybe he is a Protestant who doesn’t fall in line with common Protestant theology.
For these reasons, you need to ask people questions about their beliefs, listen to their answers, and ask follow-up questions for clarification. The point is that you want to really understand the person and his religious views, and at the same time get him to think deeply about what he believes. This could take a few minutes or longer. As you do this, consider a particular line of questioning: “What do you believe about such-and-such?”, “Why do you believe it?”, “How did you come to that conclusion?”
After you learn more about what the person believes, it’s a good idea to build bonds with him in these areas as well by establishing common ground. That is, you can bring out things that you can both agree upon and appreciate.
Example Dialogue: Listen & Befriend
In the video portion of this lesson, Mark and Bob (SPEI staff) demonstrate an example of what these stages of the conversation might look like. Here in the written portion, let’s look at another example of these stages of conversation. A Catholic has encountered a stranger wearing a Detroit Tigers shirt, and has struck up a conversation with him on the topic of baseball:
<a discussion of baseball begins the conversation>
Catholic Evangelist: Ha! Yes! You’re right! … Anyway, it’s been good talking to you about “America’s Pastime.”
Tigers’ Fan: Yeah! It has been good talking to you! It’s not often I meet someone who really knows his Tigers’ baseball.
CE: Yes, I try. … My name is Francis, by the way. What’s yours?
TF: Roger. Nice to meet you.
CE: Nice to meet you. So, Roger what do you do when you aren’t watching baseball?
TF: You know, work — I work in construction. You?
CE: I’ve got three kids, I’m an accountant, and we’re pretty involved in our church.
TF: Church, eh? How do you have the time?
CE: Yeah, I know! … Yeah, it can be difficult, but we make the time. Are you a Christian, by chance?
TF: No, not really. In my family background, yeah.
CE: What kind of background? I’m Catholic, by the way.
TF: My parents were Lutheran. I’m not sure what they are now.
CE: Hmm. So what do you think about Christianity? Do you believe any of it?
TF: I’m not 100% sure, actually.
CE: For example, what do you believe about Jesus Christ? Is he the Son of God? Or just a great figure of history? Or something else?
TF: I guess I think it’s most likely that he’s just an important historical figure. A moral teacher.
CE: I see. You know, there was a time when I wasn’t 100% sure what to believe about Jesus. Have you looked into the question at all, or put much thought into it?
TF: A little bit. I figure since, as I’ve heard, the bible wasn’t written until way after the fact, that there’s good reason to doubt that Jesus rose from the dead or anything like that. His followers may have made up a lot.
CE: Yeah! I’ve heard that line of thinking. …
[… to be continued.]